I said, ‘Fatgut, I’ll give you a present of a thousand francs between you.’
‘OK, then, brother. That sounds like a square deal to me. Thanks, because we starve to death there in the village. It’s worse being outside than in. If you’re in, at least you can fill your belly every day; and they find you in clothes.’
‘It doesn’t hurt you too much, mate?’ said Jesus to Clousiot.
‘It’s all right,’ said Clousiot. ‘But what are we going to do, Papillon, with my leg broken?’
‘We’ll see. Where we going, Jesus?’
‘I’m going to hide you in a creek twenty miles from the mouth of the river. There you can lie up for a week and let the worst of the warders’ and trackers’ hunt blow over. You must give them the idea you went right down the Maroni and out to sea this very night. The trackers go in boats with no motor, and they’re the most dangerous. If they’re on the watch, it can be fatal to you to talk or cough or have a fire. As for the screws, they’re in motor-boats that are too big to go up the creeks – they’d run aground.’
The darkness was lessening. For a long time we searched for a landmark known only to Jesus, and it was almost four o’clock before we found it: then we literally went right into the bush. The boat flattened the small undergrowth, which straightened up again behind us, making a very thick protective curtain. You had to be a wizard to know whether there was enough water to float a boat. We went in, pushing aside the branches that barred our passage and thrusting into the bush for more than an hour. All at once we were there, in a kind of canal, and we stopped. There was clean grass on the bank; and now, at six o’clock, the light did not penetrate the leaves of the huge trees. Beneath this impressive roof there were the sounds of hundreds of creatures quite unknown to us. Jesus said, ‘Here is where you have to wait for a week. I’ll come on the seventh day and bring you food.’ From under the thick vegetation he pulled a very small canoe, about six feet long. Two paddles in it. This was the craft he was going back to Saint-Laurent in, on the flood-tide.
Now we took care of Clousiot, who was lying there on the bank. He was still in his shirt, so his legs were bare. We trimmed dry branches with the axe, making splints of them. Fatgut heaved on his foot; Clousiot sweated hard and then at a given moment he cried, ‘Stop! It hurts less in this position, so the bone must be in its right place.’ We put on the splints and tied them with new hemp cord from the boat. His pain was eased. Jesus had bought four pairs of trousers, four shirts and four relégués’ woollen lumber-jackets. Maturette and Clousiot put them on: I stayed in the Arab’s clothes. We had a tot of rum. This was the second bottle since we left – it warmed us, which was a good thing. The mosquitoes did not give us a moment’s peace: we had to sacrifice a packet of tobacco. We put it to soak in a calabash and smeared the nicotine-juice over our faces, hands and feet. The woollen jackets were splendid; they kept us warm in spite of this penetrating damp.
Fatgut said, ‘We’re off. What about this thousand francs you promised?’ I went behind a bush and came back with a brand-new thousand note.
‘Be seeing you. Don’t stir from here for eight days,’ said Jesus. ‘We’ll come on the seventh. The eighth you can get out to sea. Meanwhile make the mainsail and jib; put the boat to rights, everything in its place. Fix the pintle – the rudder’s not shipped. If we don’t come within ten days, it means we’ve been arrested in the village. As there was an attack on a warder, which adds some spice to the break, there will surely be the most God-almighty bleeding rampage about it all.’
Clousiot had told us he didn’t leave the rifle at the bottom of the wall. He had flung it over, and the water was so close (which he hadn’t known) that it must certainly have gone into the river. Jesus said that was fine, because if it was not found the trackers were going to think we were armed. And since they were the really dangerous ones, we should therefore have nothing to be afraid of. Because they only had a revolver and a jungle-knife and if they thought we had rifles, they would never risk it.
Good-bye. Good-bye. If we were found and we had to leave the boat, we should go up the little stream as far as the dry bush and then steer by compass, always keeping north. In two or three days’ march we were likely to come across the death-camp called Charvin. There we should have to pay someone to tell Jesus we were in such and such a place. The two old lags pushed off. A few moments later their canoe had vanished: we neither heard nor saw anything more at all.
Daylight comes into the bush in a very special way. You would think you were in an arcade whose top caught the sun and never let a single ray make its way down to the bottom. It began to grow hot. And now here we were, Maturette, Clousiot and me, quite alone. Our first reaction was to laugh – the whole thing had run on oiled wheels. The only hitch was Clousiot’s broken leg, though he said himself that now it was held between flat pieces of wood, it was all right. We could brew the coffee straight away. This we did very quickly, making a fire and drinking a great mug of black coffee apiece, sweetened with brown sugar. It was marvellous. We had used ourselves up so much since the evening before that we hadn’t the energy to look at the things or to inspect the boat. We’d see to all that later. We were free, free, free. Exactly thirty-seven days had passed since I reached Guiana. If we brought this break off, my lifer wouldn’t have been a very long one. I said aloud, ‘Monsieur le President, how many years does penal servitude for life last in France?’ and I burst out laughing. So did Maturette – he had a lifer too. Clousiot said, ‘don’t crow too soon. Colombia’s a long way off, and this hollowed-out tree-trunk doesn’t seem to me much of a thing to go to sea in.’
I did not reply, because to tell the truth until the last moment I had thought it was just the canoe meant to take us to the real boat, the boat for the sea voyage. When I found I was wrong, I did not like to say anything, so as not to discourage my friends in the first place, and in the second not to give Jesus the idea that I didn’t know what kind of boats were usually used for a break – he seemed to think it perfectly natural.
We spent the first day talking and getting to know a little about the bush – it was completely strange to us. Monkeys and squirrels of some kind flung themselves about overhead in the most astonishing way. A herd of peccaries came down to drink: they are a kind of small wild pig. There were at least two thousand of them. They plunged into the creek and swam about, tearing off the hanging roots. An alligator emerged from God knows where and caught one pig by the foot: it started to shriek and squeal like a steam-engine, and all the others rushed at the alligator, clambering on to it and trying to bite the corners of its enormous mouth. At every blow of the alligator’s tail a pig flew into the air, one to the left, the next to the right. One pig was stunned and it floated there, belly up. Instantly its companions ate it. The creek was red with blood. This scene lasted twenty minutes and then the alligator escaped into the water. We never saw it again.
We slept well, and in the morning we made our coffee. I took off my jacket so as to wash with a big bar of common soap we found in the boat. Using my scalpel, Maturette shaved me, more or less, and then he shaved Clousiot. He himself had no beard. When I picked up my jacket to put it on again, a huge, hairy, blackish-purple spider fell out. Its hairs were very long and each ended in a little shining ball. The monstrous thing must have weighed at least a pound: I squashed it, feeling disgusted. We took everything out of the boat, including the little water-barrel. The water was violet, and it seemed to me Jesus had put in too much permanganate to make it keep. There were well-corked bottles with matches and strikers. The compass was only a schoolboy’s job – it just gave north, south, east and west: no graduations. The mast was no more than eight feet long, so we sewed the flour-sacks into a lug-sail with a border of rope to strengthen it. And I made a little triangular jib to help make the boat lie close.
When we stepped the mast I found the boat’s bottom was not sound: the slot for the mast was eaten away and badly worn. When I put in the spikes for the hinges that were to hold the rudder, they went in as if the hull were butter. The boat was rotten. That sod Jesus was sending us to our death. Very unwittingly I explained all this to the others: I had no right to hide